It’s the belief that superabundance is just a matter of being smart enough, that there are no fundamentally scarce resources.Īlas, no. I often run into it in talking with people who want to defend the plausibility of the Culture. The Culture books also implied, though they never explicitly committed, a different fallacy. This demonstrates that Marxists can clean up their shit alas, Banks never made it that far.
Subsequently his books took a decidedly libertarian turn.
Cavorite definition caveat series#
In a long and revealing interview about the genesis of one of his early series (the “October Revolution” books IIRC) he once revealed that for years he read free-market economics on the know-your-enemy principle, then woke up one day realizing he couldn’t refute them. The concept of “deadweight loss” matters as much as “entropy”.īanks’s lifelong friend and fellow Trotskyite Ken McLeod actually managed not to flunk this. An SF writer is every bit as obligated to know what won’t work in economics as he is not to make elementary blunders about chemistry and physics. The problem is epistemic and fundamental – can’t be solved by good intentions or piling on computational capacity. Eventually the SU wore out its pre-Communist infrastructure, fell down, went boom. Huge factories in Siberia destroyed wealth by producing trucks nobody needed from resources that would have been better spent on other things – but nobody could know that because there weren’t any price signals. Hayek predicted it fifty years in advance. This is what happened to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. What you get is accelerating malinvestment to collapse. That ship hits a rock called “Hayek’s Calculation Problem” and sinks – even superintelligent Minds can’t make central planning work, because without price signals and elicited preferences you can’t know where to allocate resources. They’re bad SF because the Culture’s economics is impossible. I enjoyed the Culture books too, but they were a guilty pleasure for me because in a fundamental way they are bad SF.
Cavorite definition caveat tv#
There’s a lot of buzz about Iain Banks’s Culture universe lately, what with Elon Musk naming his drone ships in Banksian style and a TV series in the works.
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